Thursday, September 9, 2010

Thursday Thinkers!!

Greetings Friends! Thursday was bustling with even more "classroom building"! We drafted our first version (thoughts) about classroom rules.... how to make our classroom feel "safe" and "fair". Everyone contributed to the conversation, and has a sense of purpose in this kind of work! We also finished writing our 100 "high frequency" words, and will be ready to use our word wall tomorrow in a guided discovery investigation using white boards! Something about super-shiny white boards, juicy-new expo markers, and a brand-spanking new word wall that makes word study AWESOME!! We did a fantastic job with math warm-up today, and have this important part of our math routine "down" (or almost down...). Learning our math facts is a very important mission in second grade, so we take it very seriously, for about 5 minutes of every math block. By the end of the year, we will hopefully know these facts "automatically"!!! Our greeting this morning was the "shoulder-touch" greeting, and was quite warm and lovely. Each student gently greeted a friend with a pat on the shoulder... nice! Recess was ridiculously fun, with a tag game called Giants, Wizards, Elves! Soooo fun to see first, second, and third graders laughing it up all together (and I mean ALL TOGETHER, at least half of the entire group) playing this fast paced action packed game! Finally, we painted our beautiful self portraits and will "sharpie" them tomorrow in writing workshop. I'd like to have a final draft of our classroom rules completed by tomorrow, so everyone come in with all your good ideas about a fair, safe, friendly, kind classroom! See you tomorrow!!